Technological advances within the field of power systems has led to engineers, at all levels, being confronted with an ever increasing amount of data to be analysed. This coincides with greater pressure on engineers to work more efficiently and cost effectively, due to the increasingly competitive nature of the electricity supply industry. As a result, there is now the requirement for intelligent systems to interpret the available data and provide information which is relevant, manageable and readily assimilated by engineers. This thesis concerns the application of intelligent systems to the data interpretation tasks of protection engineers. An on-line decision support system is discussed which integrates two expert system paradigms in order to perform power system protection performance analysis. Knowledge based system techniques are used to interpret the data from supervisory, control and data acquisition systems, whereas a model based diagnosis approach to the comprehensive validation of protection performance, using the more detailed data which is available from fault records or equivalent, is assessed. Such a decision support system removes the requirement for time consuming manual analysis of data. An assessment of power system protection performance is provided in an on-line fashion, quickly alerting the engineers to failures or problems within the protection system. This improves efficiency and maximises the benefit of having an abundance of data available.